It’s a sad business, but how can HMV survive if people don’t go to record
shops to buy music?

When Sir Edward Elgar opened the first HMV shop at 363 Oxford Street in July 1921, the great composer rhapsodised about how he had accepted the invitation to open the “palatial new premises”, with “visions of a golden key encrusted with diamonds floating before me”.

Sir Edward was the most illustrious English musical figure of the day, and his presence was a shrewd publicity stunt by the Gramophone Company, which owned the HMV name. It worked: the new shop was thronged, as one newspaper reporter had it, with “persons of eminence in the musical and scholastic worlds”, who received the great composer with “a tremendous outburst of cheering”. If someone was opening a record shop now, it would be One Direction or Adele holding the golden key. Except, of course, that now nobody in their right mind would open a record shop on Oxford Street.

Few people can have been astonished by the announcement yesterday that HMV, with its 240 shops throughout Britain and Ireland, is going into administration, a victim, like so many retailers, of the migration of shoppers to the internet.

Once the most famous record seller in Britain, HMV has long been a shadow of its former self, its shelves stocked with a lowering mixture of chart hits and cut-price CDs, DVDs and games. Games! The indignity of it!

Those who actually buy records nowadays, as opposed to downloading them, do so on the internet. The record shop is the habitat of the specialist, the obsessive, the nerd, “crate-digging” through the more obscure “limited edition” indie and dance music that continues to enjoy a twilight life on vinyl.

The first HMV shop did not just sell records. It sold gramophones and sheet music, as well as shellac 78 rpm recordings, made under the company’s famous trademark of the painting His Master’s Voice, executed in 1898 by Francis Barraud, of his brother’s dog Nipper listening to a Berliner disc gramophone.

By the Sixties sales of records in the shop were far outstripping sales of sheet music and gramophones. The store also had a small recording facility on the first floor. In February 1962, knocking on the doors of the London record companies, trying in vain to secure a deal for a group he had recently started to manage, Brian Epstein stopped off at HMV to get some acetate discs made of their demo tapes. The discs found their way to George Martin, who signed the Beatles to EMI later that year.

By then the vinyl record had become a talismanic object, and shopping for music had acquired the trappings of ritual: riffling through the racks of LPs, adjourning to a sound-proofed listening booth. As a schoolboy in the mid-Sixties I had a Saturday job in a record shop in West Croydon. Heaven! In the mornings the shop would be engulfed by mods, anxious to hear the new singles by Wilson Pickett or the Isley Brothers, played at deafening volume; the afternoons would largely be given over to playing that week’s Blue Beat releases by Prince Buster and the Skatalites for West Indians, resplendent in pork-pie hats and spiffy suits.

This idea of the record shop as pleasure zone was exemplified by Virgin, which in 1971 opened its first shop at the tatty end of Oxford Street, reproducing the ambience of a hippie crash pad, where customers were encouraged to recline at their leisure on bean-bags, often under the influence of one substance or another, listening on headphones – headphones! – to the entire oeuvre of Gong or Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, until fumbling for the necessary £2.25 to secure their purchase. Even without bean-bags, HMV profited from the soaring sales of records.

By 1977 the company had 40 stores around Britain. By the Nineties, it had become a global retailer, with shops in Japan, Australia, Canada and America. It acquired the booksellers Dillons and Waterstones. But it has failed to keep abreast of the simple fact that people no longer go into record shops. CDs are not the beloved physical objects that books are – and people tend to buy individual songs rather than albums. The thrill of discovery that a browse through the album racks used to afford can now be replicated online through such sites as Spotify and Pandora, which means that expensive floor space is even less cost-effective. CD sales fell from 175 million in 1998 to 69 million in 2012.

Retail analysts believe that around half of HMV’s 240 stores could still be profitable once the company gets rid of its debt. But selling what is not entirely clear. According to some estimates, by the end of 2015, 90 per cent of music and film sales will be online. In the meantime, those intending to make a sentimental pilgrimage to the scene of that “tremendous outburst of cheering” for Elgar are likely to be disappointed. The original HMV premises at 363 Oxford Street closed in the Nineties. It is now a branch of Foot Locker. Palatial, it’s not.